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The Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Citizens Committee for New York City (“Citizens Committee”) today announced the first-ever grant recipients like Project Harmony, in Harlem of the 2017 OneNYC Initiative.

OneNYC Initiative is a new public-private partnership that seeks to support resident-led neighborhood and school projects whose main goals include improving environmental sustainability and related quality of life conditions in underserved parts of New York City.

The OneNYC Initiative provides micro-grants of $500 to $3,000 to groups of local volunteers leading environmental projects in their communities, focused on growth, sustainability, resiliency, and equity. Groups are also receiving project-planning assistance, capacity-building workshops, and networking opportunities.

As a result of the OneNYC Initiative, everyday New Yorkers are launching farmers markets in food deserts, creating vertical gardens, caring for trees, and more. A complete list of OneNYC Initiative awardees broken down by borough and neighborhood can be found below.

The projects align with OneNYC’s Four Visions, creating healthy neighborhoods with improved access to food and more physically active residents, limiting waste and greening public space, and strengthening the resiliency of New York City neighborhoods.

Positive outcomes of OneNYC Initiative projects include, not only environmental improvements, but also community building. Because projects are based on a model that values the knowledge and importance of local people, who identify the needs of their community, develop a plan that engages at least 20 local residents, and taps into local resources, the work undertaken is culturally relevant, driven by local knowledge and people, addresses specific local needs, and takes advantage of existing resources.

Grant recipients of the first-ever OneNYC Initiative will be awarded checks in one-on-one meetings over the coming weeks. These eight grant projects will be implemented between April and September, 2017.

“Achieving our OneNYC goals of becoming the most sustainable big city in the world, and reducing the City’s greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050, requires collaboration with, and innovation from every single New Yorker,” said Mark Chambers, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability. “We applaud Citizens Committee’s work with local volunteers in creating smart, neighborhood driven sustainability projects that serve specific community needs, while creatively finding solutions to a range of environmental challenges.”

CEO Peter H. Kostmayer of Citizens Committee for New York City said: “Whatever may be happening in Washington DC, the neighborhoods of the nation’s largest city are committed to reducing the impact of climate change, increasing recycling and composting, and doing it from the bottom up. Citizens Committee for New York City has teamed up with the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability to fund small community based groups doing all manner of environmental projects in neighborhoods across all five boroughs. In the absence of strong national policy to deal with climate change, New Yorkers are stepping up to do it themselves.”